Saturday, May 30, 2015

Prayer… is entering the unseen reality of our
lives. It is allowing ourselves to
experience the mystery in which we are. […] In bringing us to the reality of
our life, prayer also introduces us to the reality of God’s life. We are put in touch with the persons of the
Holy Trinity, not through words but at a deeper level. We feel that we are from the Father and that
our whole life is a journey toward God.
We discover a sense of solidarity with the Word, in our being bonded
with the person of Jesus and in our union with all the saints. We experience the presence of the Holy
Spirit, inciting us to good, turning our thoughts to God, directing our
actions, supplying for our weakness, and, like a homing beacon for an incoming
play, guiding our steps toward the very heart of God. Divorced from this global
vision, prayer does not make much sense.

Though it may be difficult to grasp entirely, we have our
model in the Holy Trinity, a manifestation of the relationship of perfect union
for which we strive throughout the entire journey of our lives.To come to know and experience God is the
ultimate task of our lives as Christians, for God is relational:God chooses relationship, chooses to be in
relationship with humankind.

Hence Moses, in Deuteronomy, asks the people to ask themselves:have I encountered and engaged the God who
created all things?Do I have an
appreciation of the singular relationship God calls me to?God made us, Psalm 33 reminds us; God
breathed his Spirit into us, spoke one Word and we were created.Blessed
are we whom the Lord has chosen to be
his own!This is, implicitly, an
evocation of Trinity.

Jesus, Matthew tells us, has the power of the Father to give
life, and he passes that power on to the Church through the Spirit:Go,
therefore, and make disciples of all nations… The Church gives life by
baptizing and by teaching what Jesus has commanded, namely, love of God and
love of neighbor.Witnessing the
disciples’ doubt, Jesus draws closer
to them, reminding them that he is with
them always, until the end of the age.And thus is His Spirit passed on to us, the Church, so that we might
remain in him, remain, that is, in the relationship that is so central to our
identity as Christians.This is why we
can call God Abba, Daddy, as Paul
tells the Romans:the word is an
affectionate expression of connection based in intimacy and origin, signaling our
hope to be united in relationship with God.We are not simply creatures, created
to exist on this earth:we are children of God, and joint heirs with Christ, because God has
chosen to enter into relationship with us, a relationship exemplified by the
Trinity, a relationship shared, in all its awesome wonder, with us as God draws
us ever closer into the love that is Trinitarian, the love that is eternal
life.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

God spoke but one Word, and in virtue of that in a moment were made the sun, moon and that
innumerable multitude of stars, with their differences in brightness, motion
and influence. […] A single word of God’s filled the air with birds, and the
sea with fishes, made spring from the earth all the plants and all the beasts
we see. […]All these together are
called the universe, perhaps because all their diversity is reduced to unity as
though one said unidiverse, that is,
one and diverse, one with diversity and diverse with unity.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Christians have not always been open to that holy
presence.Our Vigil readings this
weekend remind us of the barriers we tend to erect when we focus more on what
we can accomplish on our own than on what God is doing in our lives.Our reading from Genesis offers the lesson of
the so-called Tower of Babel, a monument to the arrogance of those caught up in
their own state of prosperity, the same arrogance that led to humankind’s
original fall from grace:God scattered them from there all over the
earth.Hence creation’s labor pains,
humankind’s expression of longing for God, as described by Paul in his letter
to the Romans:salvation, he reminds us,
is not yet complete, but will be when we come into the full union of perfect
love, a love we will find in all its depth and wonder if we remain in the
Spirit, who comes to the aid of our
weakness.In John’s Gospel, Jesus
promises the Spirit to those who thirst for God:Rivers
of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.His promise is reminiscent of that of Psalm 104:when God’s creatures… look to God, God gives
them food in due time.As always,
the Vigil is about waiting, longing, hoping
for the coming of the Spirit, and the eventual salvation that is promised…

If the Vigil is about our longing for God, the celebration
of Pentecost Sunday helps us to recognize what the Spirit’s action in our lives
can look like if we are open to it.
Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit
on the disciples in John’s Gospel, and still they hesitate, but Luke’s account
in Acts sends them, filled with the Holy
Spirit, pouring into the street to proclaim
God’s Word, Jesus himself. A measure of the fullness of the Spirit is available
to us, too, if we are are open to it, if we truly are able to pray, with true
longing, Lord, send out your Spirit, and
renew the face of the earth. Only
then, as Paul tells the Galatians, can we enjoy the fruits of the Spirit: love,
joy, and peace, to name just a
few… May the Holy Spirit come to unite
what has been divided, and may we be open to its breath flowing forth to fill
us with God’s love.